Roughly speaking, the President of the United States knows what his job is. Constitution and custom spell it out, for him as well ...as for us. His wife has no such luck. The First Lady has no rules; rather each new woman must make her own.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The stuff of which tragedy and comedy are made is the same stuff. The foibles of mankind work up more easily into comedy than into... tragedy, and this is the chief difference between the two. We readily understand the Nemesis of temperament, the fatality of character, when it is exposed on a small scale. This is the business of comedy; and we do not here require the labored artifice of gods, mechanical plot, and pointed allegory to make us realize the moral. But in tragedy we have the large scale to deal with. A tragedy is always the same thing. It is a world of complicated and traditional stage devices for making us realize the helplessness of mankind before destiny. We are told from the start to expect the worst: there is going to be suffering, and the suffering is going to be logical, inevitable, necessary. There is also an implication to be conveyed that this suffering is somehow in accord with the moral constitution of the universe.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Come now, let us go and be dumb. Let us sit with our hands on our mouths, a long, austere, Pythagorean lustrum. Let us live in cor...ners, and do chores, and suffer, and weep, and drudge, with eyes and hearts that love the Lord. Silence, seclusion, austerity, may pierce deep into the grandeur and secret of our being, and so diving, bring up out of secular darkness, the sublimities of the moral constitution.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have heard that whoever loves is in no condition old. I have heard that whenever the name of man is spoken, the doctrine of immo...rtality is announced; it cleaves to his constitution. The mode of it baffles our wit, and no whisper comes to us from the other side. But the inference from the working of intellect, hiving knowledge, hiving skill,--at the end of life just ready to be born,--affirms the inspirations of affection and of the moral sentiment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The drama of the assassination has enlarged the personalities of both men, so it is as if each of them could have saved us from th...e troubled history that followed their deaths. Had Lincoln lived, many historians believe, his generous spirit would have labored in peace, as mightily as it had in war, to heal the nation's wounds, and perhaps much of America's tortured post-Civil War history would have been different. After Lincoln's death, a profound despair seized the nation, along with a deep bitterness that lasted for years, but America endured and the process of nation-building went on. Had John F. Kennedy lived, Robert Kennedy once told a reporter, the 1960s would have been different because he would have listened more sensitively to the young. It is somehow reassuring that even in the desperate hours after each assassination, a shaken nation, gripped with near-panic, gathered its will, looked to its Constitution, and reasserted political order.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... all the slaveholding laws violate the fundamental principles of the Constitution of the United States. In the preamble of that... instrument, the great objects for which it was framed are declared to be "to establish justice, to promote the general welfare, and to secure the blessings of liberty to us and to our posterity." The slave laws are flagrant violations of these fundamental principles. Slavery subverts justice, promotes the welfare of the few to the manifest injury of the many, and robs thousands of the posterity of their forefathers of the blessings of liberty.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The survivors of some of them are here to-day, and whatever else has come to us in life, whether honor or disappointment, I do not... think there are any of us--not me, I am sure--who would to-day exchange the satisfaction, the heart comfort we have in having been a part of the great army that subdued the rebellion, that saved the country, the Constitution, and the flag. If I were asked to exchange it for any honor that has come to me, I would lay down any civil office rather than surrender the satisfaction I have in having been an humble partaker with you in that great war.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us w...ith our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution--then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I was brought up a rigid Presbyterian, to which I have always adhered. Our excellent Constitution guarantees to everyone freedom o...f religion, and charity tells us--and you know charity is the real basis of all true religion--and charity says "judge the tree by its fruit." All who profess Christianity believe in a Savior and that by and through him we must be saved. We ought therefore to consider all good Christians whose walks correspond with their professions, be they Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Baptist, Methodist, or Roman Catholic. Let it be always remembered ... that no established religion can exist under [our] glorious Constitution.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in e...arth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »